Hoarding Rotten Food on A&E's Hoarders [video]

Monday night A&E premiered their new television series Hoarders, a documentary series about people with a severe inability to part with their belongings. Episode one featured the couple Jennifer and Ron, threatened with having their three kids removed by child protective services, their house so completely overrun with stuff that the only place the family can eat dinner together is on a bed.

The other half of the show featured Jill, a 60 year-old food hoarder, who refuses to throw any food out, no matter its expiration date. Oblivious to the odors and the grave health implications, her house is full of flies, food in various stages of decay, moldy pumpkins, and fridges and freezers held shut with duct tape. Threatened with eviction, her family and professionals attempt to clean her house and get her to recognize that she has a problem.

Here's the opening segment with Jill that gives a tour of her house. It's tragic and horrifying and gross, but nowhere near as gruesome as later scenes in which the house is purged. (We had trouble watching the full episode on the Hoarders website, but give that a shot, or try to catch repeats.)

11 Comments

That was quite a sight. She had at least three packed fridges, each with rotting food. She even joked about how she can eat things that a normal person can't. Anosmia wasn't mentioned, but I'd be shocked if she can smell. It was a relatively happy ending though, which is good.

I saw this today right before reading this post! The weirdest thing about the whole situation was that the woman was supposedly a good cook (her son said) and seemed to have an appreciation for good ingredients, but let them sit around rotting in her house! So bizarre!

I can understand why people get sentimental and hoard things but I totally do not get why anyone would hoard rotten food!? Did you see that fly catcher in the middle of the room full of dead flies? Gross!

I have some hoarding tendencies, but not with food. The part of the episode where I really recognized how badly she needed help was when she wouldn't let the guy dispose of the rotted pumpkin without saving some seeds.

I also tend to want to hang on to things, but NOT food. Food items have a more limited time frame for use. So, I cannot relate to buying tons of food that they know they can't possibly use up before it gets bad or moldy. This woman was pathetic in that she seemed psycho in her belief that it was fine to continue to buy food when she needed to use up things before buying more. Same can be said for a lot of things, but food is not something that will keep for very long. Even canned goods expire after so long.

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